Re: [WikiEN-l] Fair use outside of mainspace (was: Proposal on userbox...)

Mainly because a large deal of our feeling confident that our use of unlicensed copyrighted material is "fair" is that it is purportedly for "comment and criticism." This approach seems backed up by a number of informed sources, i.e. http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter9/9-a.ht… lists "Comment and Criticism" and "Parody" as the two primary categories of things which receive legal blessing for "Fair use" claims. I think most people have a pretty poor view of what counts legally as the latter (most seem to think it just means "used in a funny way" which is not at all how the courts interpret "parody"). As for the former, the Stanford page says: "If you are commenting upon or critiquing a copyrighted work--for instance, writing a book review -- fair use principles allow you to reproduce some of the work to achieve your purposes. Some examples of commentary and criticism include: - quoting a few lines from a Bob Dylan song in a music review - summarizing and quoting from a medical article on prostate cancer in a news report - copying a few paragraphs from a news article for use by a teacher or student in a lesson, or - copying a portion of a Sports Illustrated magazine article for use in a related court case. The underlying rationale of this rule is that the public benefits from your review, which is enhanced by including some of the copyrighted material. Additional examples of commentary or criticism are provided in the examples of fair use cases in Section C." Now whether we achieve this in the article namespace is of course often under discussion. In the User and Template namespaces media is primarily used for decoration and personalization. This would not seem to fall under the above descriptions even in a very optimistic approach. Unfortunately the Stanford Fair Use case summaries page has almost nothing relating to using images on webpages (only the "thumbnailing" case which is not quite the same thing) so it is hard to know what sort of precedent one would be fallnig back upon in either direction. I know a few cases offhand but I'm not a lawyer and it is hard for me to sort through what is most relevant and what would not be. This is, anyway, my understanding of what the policy is based upon, for better or worse. There is also a crude risk/benefit equation going on here. There is simply no compelling reason to allow unlicensed, copyrighted images in the user namespace, and a number of reasons to be suspicious of it. FF On 1/4/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal(a)inbox.org> wrote: